I made a promise to myself that I would keep political (and other non-musical) commentary on here to a very bare minimum. But well...The New Republic's Jonathan Chait now has a blog and the cockles of my mildly liberal heart have been warmed to their core.

...this organization is now officially in danger of folding.

Art of the Fugue - Brass Version

(Pittsburgh Symphony Brass)

This is really something. TAOTF really is a tough piece to get into. Most performers treat it with kid gloves, as though it's purely schematic music with no real reason for interest except academic ones. Two years ago I heard Pierre Laurent Aimard play it exactly like that, and I've never seen an audience so excited to hear Elliott Carter...

I've had the sneaking suspicion since I had to make a study of it in college that TAOTF only really works on the organ. Rhythmically, the piece is often flat as day-old matzoh. There's simply no way to shape it without an enormous dynamic range. Perhaps this is also why a brass quintet works so well for it. Not only does the piece get enormous dynamic range, but the bass line can have octave doublings at the climaxes.

One day there will be an enormous post of Art of the Fugue, not tonight though.

BLYLEVEN BELONGS!

that is all.

World's Most Useless Machine

h/t Harris

Animaniacs: Yakko's Universe Song

Smells Like Teen Spirit: on the Ukuleles

...was never much of a Nirvana fan. But this is strangely delightful.

27 sounds manufactured in a kitchen: by John Cage

h/t Artsjournal.

Sarkozy Drunk

An oldie but a goodie. This is especially weird since Sarkozy an avowed teetotaller (probably the first French leader in history to claim that). But when you're trying to impress the world's Judo-chopper-in-chief I suppose there are certain lengths one must go, with rather hilarious results. Somehow, this Sarkozy strikes me as a more likable world leader.

Presentation of the Rose

All this Strauss has made me think about one of the other bedrocks of Imperial Vienna - the other Strauss. Richard has no relation to Johann, and his purebred Bavarian stock cut a distinctly out-of-place figure in the fin de siecle Vienna of Mahler and Klimt. But right as Mahler left Vienna, Strauss hitched his wagon to the star of one of Vienna's great poets - the extremely Viennese (and part-Jewish...perhaps that goes without saying) Hugo von Hoffmansthal. I suppose I could talk about the greatest of all "Viennese" operas: Der Rosenkavalier. But perhaps its better to reprint (without permission..) what the great Clive James has to say about the matter:


In Der Rosenkavalier, the Act II duet usually known as the "Presentation of the Silver Rose" is likely to be the way in for a first-time viewer. It’s so seductive at first hearing that you want them to sing it again. This duet was one of the things that got me started on grand opera in general, and Richard Strauss became one of my first enthusiasms. The old devil thought that there could be nothing more truly beautiful than a soprano and a mezzo singing rings around each other. This conviction could sometimes cloy, but in the case of the Silver Rose duet he was right. The opera, premiered in 1911, was already a flashback to a more gracious time, Vienna in the 1740s, but from our standpoint it makes the pre-WWI period look like the lost paradise. In the libretto, by Strauss’s long-term collaborator Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the lecherous but cash-poor Baron Ochs has his oafish eye on Sophie Faninal, prize daughter of a rich upcoming family, and has sent the dashing young Count Octavian Rofrano to make the pitch. In the music, what happens next is a revelation. The two young people prefigure the fulfilment of their future passion through a sublime tissue of interweaving melodic lines. With so much lyricism on tap, it’s all too easy to dip the silver rose in chocolate, but in this performance it shines clean, bright and infinitely elegant.



The number is as hard to act as it is to sing, but it was done brilliantly in the 1985 Covent Garden performance recorded for television and now on DVD. Sir George Solti was the conductor, the American soprano Barbara Bonney was the perfect Sophie, and the role of Octavian was majestically incarnated by the stunning British mezzo Anne Howells, singing and acting with the finely controlled clarity of emotion that the role demands but doesn’t always get. With everyone at the top of their game, together they made magic, even though the composer was so obviously intent on achieving nothing else.


(and just for good measure the final trio sung by three sopranos. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Sena Jurinac and Anneliese Rothenberger, with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Vienna Philharmonic.)

In Praise of Tradition - part 3

Ah hell, more Johann Strauss. Why not? Nobody listens to him much after the first week of January. Might as well let him have his day in the sun.



Here's Erich Kleiber doing "The Artist's Life" in 1929 with the Vienna Philharmonic, only audio unfortunately. Again, this is how to play Johann Strauss, and it's fascinating that the Kleibers gave Strauss so much attention when so many of the other great German conductors refused to give Strauss his due (Herbert von Karajan actually being a shining exception). They all conducted him a little bit: even Furtwangler did from time to time, but neither Furtwangler or Klemperer or Bruno Walter or Fritz Busch seemed to view Strauss as more than a wonderful purveyor of encores. Very few musicians have ever given Johann Strauss the seriousness he deserves as a great composer. No, his music does not particularly plumb the depths, but there's far less harmonic variety in major keys than there are in minor keys. As in life, it's far harder in music to be interesting when you're happy. And any composer able to keep things interesting and light at the same time deserves all due credit.

And for anybody who thinks that Strauss is all fluff, there's a famous story about Brahms that a young Viennese musician once asked him for an autograph. Brahms, a close friend of Johann Strauss's, complied by writing in the student's notebook the opening theme from the Blue Danube with the inscription underneath "Unfortunately not by J. Brahms."


(A frail Herbert von Karajan conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Voices of Spring in 1987 with Kathleen Battle singing the often omitted solo soprano line.)

Note

I would certainly lend an h/t if it were the case but my idea to post Kleiber doing the Blue Danube came to me completely independently of the wonderful Jessica Duchen and her post of the same material a few hours earlier. Good taste thinks alike I suppose.

The Beautiful Blue Danube

This is an incredible document. The still-underrated Erich Kleiber (yes, Carlos's father) conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in 1932. Perhaps as much a memento of Weimar Germany as it is of a bygone era of performance (Erich Kleiber was a fierce anti-Nazi who rarely ever returned to Germany after Hitler's rise). Carlos once recounted a story that his father told him 'Never conduct a waltz, it's the most difficult thing in the world to conduct.' But both father and son mastered the waltz as few others ever have and listening to this video you see exactly why. As opposed to the waltz melancolique muzak that performances of Strauss often sound like, this is exactly how Johann Strauss is supposed to sound. No two beats of a Strauss Waltz should ever be exactly alike. The players have to be absolutely alert for every nuance of the music because no music sounds more boring when played on autopilot. It's music that is every bit as commanding and charismatic as any ever written, but it needs performers of equal greatness to come alive.


...and for the hell of it here's Carlos doing the Fledermaus overture with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1989. For anybody who needs to understand why CK might have been the most gifted conductor of the century, just watch. Even of the picture is two beats ahead of the sound, you'll understand almost immediately.

I promise by all that is holy if this decade is ever called the 'Tweens' again I'm going to set off a nuclear device in the lobby of the NPR offices.

Osama Bit Me

I'm not sure if this was an idea of genius or incredibly stupid, but I'm reasonably certain its one or the other. Below is the original (most watched video on youtube) for reference.

Happy New Year!

(Blue Danube, 2008 conducted by Georges Pretre)

Uncork the Strauss in Vienna. It's 2010! And that means I tune in like a crack monkey to the Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert knowing fully well that it will be a crashing bore. But I love the music too much not to.

Georges Pretre does the honors again this year after a surprisingly excellent outing two years ago. New Year's will always be Strauss for me, try to tell me this music doesn't put anybody in a good mood. And now that Walter Cronkite's dead maybe the VPO will try to do an interesting broadcast (we miss Walter!!!).


(Radetzky March 2009, conducted by Daniel Barenboim)